Summary Growth Hacker Marketing

"A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable" - Growth Hacker Marketing, page xxv

If you want to truly understand what “growth hacking” is then dive into Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday. In this book, one that reads more like a series of blog posts, Holiday breaks down what growth hacking really is, what it looks like via real world applications and explains how it sets itself apart from traditional Marketing and PR.

The approach of this book is to show you that growth hacking is a mindset. It is a specific way of seeing and thinking about business and products/services. Growth hacking is not a set of skills or tactics you can learn and then repeat over and over again to create successful campaigns. It’s about seeing opportunity in the smallest of things and then sharing it with people that can and will get really excited about it.

The great part of this book is how Holiday uses real life examples across multiple types of companies to illustrate what a growth hacking mindset looks like in action. It’s through these examples that you truly come to understand what constitutes growth hacking and how you may be able to shift your thinking to become a growth hacker yourself. The Golden Egg Growth Hacking is a Mindset Not a Tactic

"Growth hacking at its core means putting aside the notion that marketing is a self-contained act that begins toward the end of a company’s or a product’s development life cycle. It is instead, a way of thinking and looking at your business." - Growth Hacker Marketing, page xxix

To be a true growth hacker you must think more holistically and less about the nuts and bolts of performing your everyday tasks. While at the end of the day it’s all about increasing revenue, the initial impetus that spurs that growth comes from the desire to help make life easier.

The growth hacker knows their core audience — often times because they are a member of that audience. They understand the pain points, and they understand what the group will get excited about. The hard part is matching how to improve the product/service to further help their core audience. The easy part is “selling” it to them. For you Marketers out there, isn’t that a twist? Gem #1 Growth Hacking = Product Development

"You are, in effect, the translator who helps bridge the producers and the consumers so they are in alignment." - Growth Hacker Marketing, page 5

The new way of doing business is to break down the silos many large and small companies have built up over the years. If you look at how and why the startup craze is still thriving — it’s in part because these companies are so agile. They understand everyone in the company is a part of the Marketing team and therefore improving the product to address the needs of the customer becomes the number one priority.

“Product Market Fit is a feeling backed with data and information,” writs Holiday.

It’s no longer about creating products/services in a laboratory bubble. It’s about everyone in the company communicating about the customers’ needs and then solving them. Growth Hacking is the term that encompasses this concept, that everyone is invested in making the customer as happy as possible, and then helps evangelize the superiority of this product/service to those that care most about it.